GNUPGHOME for Linux?

[Stefan X]

Hi!
On Linux I would like to change the homedirectory from ~/.gnupg to
/something/else.

Defining GNUPGHOME has no effect on my Linux system while it worked on
Windows. Does this option not exist in GnuPG for Linux? How to define
something similar.

Because I want to use gnupg indirectly through other porgrams I can NOT
use a parameter such as "--homedir".

The only workaround I found was setting HOME to /something/else and use
/something/else/.gnupg . But this is ugly.

Any ideas?